FreeBSD on IBM System x3650 M4

M

mkonuklar

Hello there,

I am improving myself about FreeBSD and its components. Now I have been asked to install FreeBSD system on a machine. We have IBM System x3650 M4 Machine( http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardwar ... specs.html ). Has anyone installed FreeBSD on this machine before? If yes, I'd appreciate all your opinions. We are thinking to install a mail server on this machine. Is FreeBSD compatible with this machine?


Thanks in advance.
 
mkonuklar said:
I am improving myself about FreeBSD and its components. Now I have been asked to install FreeBSD system on a machine. We have IBM System x3650 M4 Machine( http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardwar ... specs.html ). Has anyone installed FreeBSD on this machine before? If yes, I'd appreciate all your opinions. We are thinking to install a mail server on this machine. Is FreeBSD compatible with this machine?
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With the possible exception of the RAID controller, I don't see anything there that should cause problems. The best test, however, is to download the live filesystem image for whatever FreeBSD release you plan on running, boot from that (it won't modify any data on the system unless you tell it to) and you can then check to make sure you get a successful boot, all your hardware is detected correctly, and so on.

The one issue with any of the "big brand" systems (IBM / HP / Dell / etc.) is that things like firmware updates, etc. usually run only under the small set of operating systems they support. Depending on the particular vendor's service philosophy, that may mean that you keep a bootable partition with Windows / Linux / whatever on the system so the tech can install updates.
 
I'm right now burning 9.2-release onto a DVD. There is a x3650 M4 nearby. The only problem is that the person who owns it actually uses it, and will get very upset if I blow his OS install away. My plan is to talk to him (going to be next week, as it is now Friday night), and see whether I can borrow that machine for an hour or two, and re-image his boot disk.

Warning: x3650s come in many flavors, and can have many different disk IO configurations, with different disk controllers. It's is theoretically possible that one configuration works, and another one doesn't. I also worry whether there are disk controller management tools available under FreeBSD (the equivalent of Linux' MegaCli64, for the LSI controllers). If those aren't available, then configuring the disks will become a painful exercise in using the BIOS-based tools, which may make running FreeBSD impractical.
 
Terry_Kennedy said:
The one issue with any of the "big brand" systems (IBM / HP / Dell / etc.) is that things like firmware updates, etc. usually run only under the small set of operating systems they support. Depending on the particular vendor's service philosophy, that may mean that you keep a bootable partition with Windows / Linux / whatever on the system so the tech can install updates.
Click to expand...

Absolutely correct. Check whether the firmware update tools are available under FreeBSD (I'm going to bet they are not, but I haven't checked). If they aren't, then create a small partition and put Linux on it. Modern computers have an enormous amount of firmware (motherboard, service processor, network cards, disk controller cards, RAID cards, disks themselves), and doing firmware updates by hand is so tedious as to be impractical. In particular if you have many machines in production, usually all subtly different. It's much easier to run the vendor-provided tool in a suitable OS.

Update Monday afternoon: Tried booting a FreeBSD 9.2 install disk on a x3650M4. Completely forgot that I had downloaded the i386 version, not the amd64 version. The UEFI boot refused to even boot from the disk. Now downloading the correct boot image, and then I'll have to disable UEFI on the node. More updates later ...
 
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